The Moonstone
no time for whistling, Mr. Betteredge, as you say. It’s time to take
this business in hand, now, without sparing anybody. We’ll begin with
Rosanna Spearman. Where is Joyce?”
We both called for Joyce, and received no answer. I sent one of the
stable-boys to look for him.
“You heard what I said to Miss Verinder?” remarked the Sergeant, while
we were waiting. “And you saw how she received it? I tell her plainly
that her leaving us will be an obstacle in the way of my recovering her
Diamond—and she leaves, in the face of that statement! Your young lady
has got a travelling companion in her mother’s carriage, Mr.
Betteredge—and the name of it is, the Moonstone.”
I said nothing. I only held on like death to my belief in Miss Rachel.
The stable-boy came back, followed—very unwillingly, as it appeared to
me—by Joyce.
“Where is Rosanna Spearman?” asked Sergeant Cuff.
“I can’t account for it, sir,” Joyce began; “and I am very sorry. But
somehow or other——”
“Before I went to Frizinghall,” said the Sergeant, cutting him short,
“I told you to keep your eyes on Rosanna Spearman, without allowing her
to discover that she was being watched. Do you mean to tell me that you
have let her give you the slip?”
“I am afraid, sir,” says Joyce, beginning to tremble, “that I was
perhaps a little _too_ careful not to let her discover me. There are
such a many passages in the lower parts of this house——”
“How long is it since you missed her?”
“Nigh on an hour since, sir.”
“You can go back to your regular business at Frizinghall,” said the
Sergeant, speaking just as composedly as ever, in his usual quiet and
dreary way. “I don’t think your talents are at all in our line, Mr.
Joyce. Your present form of employment is a trifle beyond you. Good
morning.”
The man slunk off. I find it very difficult to describe how I was
affected by the discovery that Rosanna Spearman was missing. I seemed
to be in fifty different minds about it, all at the same time. In that
state, I stood staring at Sergeant Cuff—and my powers of language quite
failed me.
“No, Mr. Betteredge,” said the Sergeant, as if he had discovered the
uppermost thought in me, and was picking it out to be answered, before
all the rest. “Your young friend, Rosanna, won’t slip through my
fingers so easy as you think. As long as I know where Miss Verinder is,
I have the means at my disposal of tracing Miss Verinder’s accomplice.
I prevented them from communicating last night. Very good. They will
get together at Frizinghall, instead of getting together here. The
present inquiry must be simply shifted (rather sooner than I had
anticipated) from this house, to the house at which Miss Verinder is
visiting. In the meantime, I’m afraid I must trouble you to call the
servants together again.”
I went round with him to the servants’ hall. It is very disgraceful,
but it is not the less true, that I had another attack of the
detective-fever, when he said those last words. I forgot that I hated
Sergeant Cuff. I seized him confidentially by the arm. I said, “For
goodness’ sake, tell us what you are going to do with the servants
now?”
The great Cuff stood stock-still, and addressed himself in a kind of
melancholy rapture to the empty air.
“If this man,” said the Sergeant (apparently meaning me), “only
understood the growing of roses he would be the most completely perfect
character on the face of creation!” After that strong expression of
feeling, he sighed, and put his arm through mine. “This is how it
stands,” he said, dropping down again to business. “Rosanna has done
one of two things. She has either gone direct to Frizinghall (before I
can get there), or she has gone first to visit her hiding-place at the
Shivering Sand. The first thing to find out is, which of the servants
saw the last of her before she left the house.”
On instituting this inquiry, it turned out that the last person who had
set eyes on Rosanna was Nancy, the kitchenmaid.
Nancy had seen her slip out with a letter in her hand, and stop the
butcher’s man who had just been delivering some meat at the back door.
Nancy had heard her ask the man to post the letter when he got back to
Frizinghall. The man had looked at the address, and had said it was a
roundabout way of delivering a letter directed to Cobb’s Hole, to post
it at Frizinghall—and that, moreover, on a Saturday, which would
prevent the letter from getting to its destination until Monday
morning. Rosanna had answered that the delivery of the letter being
delayed till Monday was of no importance. The only thing she wished to
be sure of was that the man would do what she told him. The man had
promised to do it, and had driven away. Nancy had been called back to
her work in the kitchen. And no other person had seen anything
afterwards of Rosanna Spearman.
“Well?” I asked, when we were alone again.
“Well,” says the Sergeant. “I must go to Frizinghall.”
“About the letter, sir?”
“Yes. The memorandum of the hiding-place is in that letter. I must see
the address at the post-office. If it is the address I suspect, I shall
pay our friend, Mrs. Yolland, another visit on Monday next.”
I went with the Sergeant to order the pony-chaise. In the stable-yard
we got a new light thrown on the missing girl.
CHAPTER XIX
The news of Rosanna’s disappearance had, as it appeared, spread among
the out-of-door servants. They too had made their inquiries; and they
had just laid hands on a quick little imp, nicknamed “Duffy”—who was
occasionally employed in weeding the garden, and who had seen Rosanna
Spearman as lately as half-an-hour since. Duffy was certain that the
girl had passed him in the fir-plantation, not walking, but _running_,
in the direction of the sea-shore.
“Does this boy know the coast hereabouts?” asked Sergeant Cuff.
“He has been born and bred on the coast,” I answered.
“Duffy!” says the Sergeant, “do you want to earn a shilling? If you do,
come along with me. Keep the pony-chaise ready, Mr. Betteredge, till I
come back.”
He started for the Shivering Sand, at a rate that my legs (though well
enough preserved for my time of life) had no hope of matching. Little
Duffy, as the way is with the young savages in our parts when they are
in high spirits, gave a howl, and trotted off at the Sergeant’s heels.
Here again, I find it impossible to give anything like a clear account
of the state of my mind in the interval after Sergeant Cuff had left
us. A curious and stupefying restlessness got possession of me. I did a
dozen different needless things in and out of the house, not one of
which I can now remember. I don’t even know how long it was after the
Sergeant had gone to the sands, when Duffy came running back with a
message for me. Sergeant Cuff had given the boy a leaf torn out of his
pocket-book, on which was written in pencil, “Send me one of Rosanna
Spearman’s boots, and be quick about it.”
I despatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna’s room;
and I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the
boot.
This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the
directions which I had received. But I was resolved to see for myself
what new mystification was going on before I trusted Rosanna’s boot in
the Sergeant’s hands. My old notion of screening the girl, if I could,
seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour. This state
of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as
soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a
man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.
As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came
down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind. I heard
the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay. A
little further on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee
of the sandhills. Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling
in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like
a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one
solitary black figure standing on it—the figure of Sergeant Cuff.
He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me. “Keep on
that side!” he shouted. “And come on down here to me!”
I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if it
was like to leap out of me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred
questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips. His
face frightened me. I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of
horror. He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a footmark
on the sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight
towards the rocky ledge called the South Spit. The mark was not yet
blurred out by the rain—and the girl’s boot fitted it to a hair.
The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a
word.
I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had
failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down
and down to where the rocks and the sand joined. The South Spit was
just awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden
face of the Shivering Sand. Now this way and now that, with an
obstinate patience that was dreadful to see, Sergeant Cuff tried the
boot in the footsteps, and always found it pointing the same
way—straight _to_ the rocks. Hunt as he might, no sign could he find
anywhere of the footsteps walking _from_ them.
He gave it up at last. Still keeping silence, he looked again at me;
and then he looked out at the waters before us, heaving in deeper and
deeper over the quicksand. I looked where he looked—and I saw his
thought in his face. A dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on a
sudden. I fell upon my knees on the beach.
“She has been back at the hiding-place,” I heard the Sergeant say to
himself. “Some fatal accident has happened to her on those rocks.”
The girl’s altered looks, and words, and actions—the numbed, deadened
way in which she listened to me, and spoke to me—when I had found her
sweeping the corridor but a few hours since, rose up in my mind, and
warned me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his guess was wide of the
dreadful truth. I tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me up.
I tried to say, “The death she has died, Sergeant, was a death of her
own seeking.” No! the words wouldn’t come. The dumb trembling held me
in its grip. I couldn’t feel the driving rain. I couldn’t see the
rising tide. As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature came
back before me. I saw her again as I had seen her in the past time—on
the morning when I went to fetch her into the house. I heard her again,
telling me that the Shivering Sand seemed to draw her to it against her
will, and wondering whether her grave was waiting for her _there_. The
horror of it struck at me, in some unfathomable way, through my own
child. My girl was just her age. My girl, tried as Rosanna was tried,
might have lived that miserable life, and died this dreadful death.
The Sergeant kindly lifted me up, and turned me away from the sight of
the place where she had perished.
With that relief, I began to fetch my breath again, and to see things
about me, as things really were. Looking towards the sandhills, I saw
the men-servants from out-of-doors, and the fisherman, named Yolland,
all running down to us together; and all, having taken the alarm,
calling out to know if the girl had been found. In the fewest words,
the Sergeant showed them the evidence of the footmarks, and told them
that a fatal accident must have happened to her. He then picked out the
fisherman from the rest, and put a question to him, turning about again
towards the sea: “Tell me,” he said. “Could a boat have taken her off,